


sacrifice

by kitsunerei88



Series: Revolutionary Arc Plus Extras [9]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Rigel Black Series - murkybluematter
Genre: Character Study, Fanfiction of Fanfiction, Gen, Psychological Trauma, RevArc, Rigel Black Exchange, Rigelverse, The Pureblood Pretense, The Rigel Black Chronicles, The Rigel Black Series, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:08:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23978707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsunerei88/pseuds/kitsunerei88
Summary: Christie Blake made a decision in 1977, and she can’t take it back. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to.
Series: Revolutionary Arc Plus Extras [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1722145
Comments: 11
Kudos: 34
Collections: Rigel Black Exchange Round 1





	sacrifice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [royal_purple](https://archiveofourown.org/users/royal_purple/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Liar Liar](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17632973) by [kitsunerei88](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsunerei88/pseuds/kitsunerei88). 



There is a package on her desk.

It is small and square, wrapped in heavy brown paper and tied with twine, sitting on the centre of her leather desk pad. She stops for a minute, breathing through the rising tide of anxiety that threatens to swallow her, through the sudden ache of pain in her gut. She knows what it is, and she both wants to see it, wants to rip it open right here and now, and she wants to never see it or think about it ever.

Instead, because it’s the beginning of the workday, because she can’t afford to let her team see her in the middle of a full-blown panic attack, and because she has secrets, she very deliberately walks to her desk, picks up the package, and slides it into her bag. She will look at it later.

She always does.

* * *

Twice a year. The packages are left on her desk twice a year, once in September and again in January. Evan leaves them for her, knowing that she can only rarely bear to see him in person. He induces panic attacks.

She went on sabbatical for three years after Aldon was born, fully funded by the company. Evan has a silver tongue, and he convinced everyone that a doctoral degree in alchemy was in the company’s best interests. She can’t help but be pitifully, pathetically grateful, even if Evan is the reason that she needs to flee. It turns out to be a good choice, because every few years when it all becomes too much, when she decides that she needs to run, there’s always a position somewhere in the world that will take her for a year on a research sabbatical. Evan always manages to get her the year off, no questions asked.

She doesn’t see him—Aldon, that is, not Evan. She tries not to see Evan, either, but there are meetings that need to happen, especially when she is promoted to division head. Thankfully, nearly all of those meetings are with ten other division heads or the Board of Directors, and there are very few moments that she needs to spend alone with Evan.

It’s for the best, she tells herself, year after year. She and Evan had seen the writing on the wall, through the many years of their relationship. When they first started seeing each other, they kept it quiet because Evan was the son of the Head, and the Rosier Heir, and she was a nobody. Then, being Muggleborn hadn’t mattered so much. Muggleborns were still common enough, still being hired within the Ministry and at St. Mungo’s and in many other companies. It had been her non-noble status that had been the problem, and Evan just needed time.

Then, things started changing underneath them. The laws stayed the same, but preferential policies were put in place to prefer Hogwarts graduates. What little anti-discrimination laws that were in place were quietly repealed in the name of greater freedom for businesses. More Muggleborns began staying abroad in America, where they received better job offers, and Christie began seeing fewer and fewer people like her in Wizarding Britain. With fewer Muggleborns in the population, and without Muggleborns at Hogwarts, the words that people used to describe her and people like her started changing.

The writing was on the wall well before 1981. By 1976, when she was pregnant with Aldon, the Hogwarts Board of Governors had brought motions to exclude halfbloods from the school twice over, defeated by narrower and narrower margins. In the Wizengamot, there was legislation on the table to prevent any organization above a certain size from hiring anyone educated abroad, and even if it hadn’t passed yet, it was only a matter of time.

Aldon is happy now, she reminds herself. Evan says he is happy, and all the pictures he gives her shows him smiling, laughing. He’s the acknowledged Rosier Heir, and he goes to Hogwarts as a pureblood. Because he is considered a pureblood, every door is open to him—he can take a job at the Ministry if he wants, no one will hold his blood status against him in his personal or professional life, and he can be and do anything he wants. Everything that should be his will be his, and she did the right thing by giving him up.

It takes her two glasses of wine before she has the courage to fetch the package from her bag. Aldon is sixteen, now, almost seventeen. She could never bear to see him, not even when Evan had suggested it. There were a thousand ways that Evan could design that would have her able to see him. She could have become a “family friend”; he could have brought Aldon to the office more.

She could never have borne it, though. She could hardly look at Evan, so how could she look at the child she once gave up?

Pictures are safer.

Her hands reach for the twine holding the brown package shut. One tug of her fingers, and the twine falls away, opening Evan’s biannual gift. There’s a letter on top, because there’s always a letter on top, and Christie puts it aside. She knows what it will say: Evan loves her. He misses her. He wishes she would let him see her, and he wishes things were different. He’ll offer to give her things, a million things that she would love, if she would just see him again.

She’ll read it when she feels stronger. Or maybe, when she feels weaker. Sometimes, rarely, his words convince her, and they go out—dinner, a movie. A weekend trip to France, or Italy, or Greece. A few weeks, a few months, and then she’ll remember all the reasons why it can’t happen. And then she’ll find another project abroad and take another sabbatical.

There’s a box. Of course, there’s a box. There’s always a box, something for her, something from Evan to tell her in the only form he knows how that he loves her. It’ll be something she likes, because after so many years he does know her taste, and it’ll be beautiful. She pulls it open, seeing the delicate, sapphire moon on a silver chain.

It’s exquisite, and she’ll never wear it. It’ll join the collection of other, similarly stunning pieces of jewellery in her closet.

Underneath, she sees the pictures.

Aldon is sixteen years old now, and he still looks just like his father. There are the same gold eyes that drew Christie so many years ago, dark hair that is artfully tousled just the way that Evan had done so many years ago. He is slighter in form than his father, his chin is pointed rather than square, but otherwise he seems to take nothing from her.

It’s better that way.

There’s a picture of him in formal robes, looking very handsome with a smile on his face as he stands with Evan and Lina. There’s another of him dancing, later that night with a girl that Christie doesn’t know; she wonders if Aldon likes her, or if it’s only politeness. A third picture of Aldon standing with his friends, laughing. The pictures have dried up a little since Aldon started school, but the few that exist are all that she needs.

Her hands shake as she touches each one. She wants. She wants to see Aldon in person, she wants to talk to him. She wants to touch him, hug him, hold him. She wants to know if he’s as much like his father as his pictures suggest.

She can’t.

* * *

She is working late, one evening in April, when Evan walks in.

She freezes, her hands shaking, her heart pounding. Evan stops near the doorway, waiting for her to collect herself. Normally, she needs at least a day to prepare to see Evan. Without it, she chokes. Her breath catches in her throat and her chest aches, but she’s also soaring, some part of her leaping for joy. If soulmates exist, then Evan is hers, but that doesn’t mean she should be with him.

“I need to speak to you,” he says. His voice is low and melodious. “Please, Christie.”

She takes a moment to breathe, or maybe it’s a few moments. Maybe even a few minutes, but Evan waits for her.

“What is it?” she asks, trembling slightly. The room is shrinking around her, around them, and Evan only needs a few steps to reach her desk. He is tall, broad-shouldered, and more than twenty-five years later she still finds him as handsome as she did the day they met.

“I’m here to ask you a favour,” Evan admits. He doesn’t sit in the chair across from her, stays standing with a concerned, apologetic furrow in his brow. “Aldon wants to return to your division in the summer. You were away last summer, so I saw no harm in letting him work there last year but—he wants to return.”

Christie stares at him and realizes she has stopped breathing. She sucks in a breath, which rattles a little in her chest.

“I—should I…”

“No, no!” Evan reaches out a hand, then drops it when Christie takes a step back. “No, please—stay. But Aldon is… he is much like you, by his interests. He is academic, intrigued by magical theory. He wants this, Christie.”

“Even you can’t—can’t swing another sabbatical for me so soon after my last one.” Christie looks away. “I don’t know that I can—“

“You can,” Evan insists. “He—he’s good at what he does, and there will always be others around, and he won’t—he deserves this, Christie. Please.”

She stops, closes her mouth, and she breathes. One breath, two breaths, three. It’s not that she doesn’t want Aldon to work in her division. She wants it—she wants to see what he’s like, and Evan admitting that he is much like her only makes her want it more. But Aldon knows nothing, and he shouldn’t know anything. Can she handle having him around her an entire summer?

She doesn’t know if she can.

“Don’t let our relationship affect him,” Evan pleads, his gold eyes begging. “It’s not fair to him. What we did, how he came to be, that isn’t his fault. Please, Christie.”

It wouldn’t be fair to Aldon if she refuses. She wonders if it’s fair to her if she does.

But mothers make sacrifices. Mothers make it work, and they don’t allow their emotional issues to affect their children.

“All right,” she says, looking away. “Just—just send him here directly at nine-thirty on his first day. I’ll—I’ll deal with it.”

* * *

When he arrives, her colleagues welcome him with smiles, a few pats on the back. She only sits back and watches him, drinking him in.

He looks just like his pictures, and yet not at all. His hair is dark and tousled, his eyes bright gold and curious, and a small smile dances across his face as he greets everyone in the room. His robes are perfectly tailored, not that Christie thought that Evan would ever have allowed otherwise, and she can hear that his voice is light and musical. He is in her division, and he is real, and he lives and breathes and moves in three dimensions. He is nothing like his pictures.

In person, she can see that he does take after her family, at least a little. He is slight in his photos, but even more so in real life. He is only her height—tall for a woman, but short compared to most men—and he is slender and lean like the men in her family, not like his father. The photos make him out to be bigger than he is, she thinks, and they don’t carry across the life in front of her. He is greeting her colleagues, polite but a little stiff, and no one tries to hug him.

It takes her a few minutes to gather the courage to approach. It takes the fact that her entire team is watching for her to approach. Aldon is real, and he is here, and he is seventeen.

He has no idea who she is, and it’s better for him that it stays that way.

“Aldon Rosier,” she says, coming forward and offering her hand. She smiles, but it trembles. “Your father said that you were interested in returning to New Developments for another summer. He says you are interested in magical theory.”

Aldon pauses, a slight frown bringing his eyebrows together. He glances at her hand, and his shoulders stiffen for a second. His golden eyes snap up, flashing with uncertainty, but he takes her hand.

“That’s right,” he says, and he smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> to royal_purple: hope you enjoyed! all of Christie's feelings are complicated, so I enjoyed writing it, but here's hoping this meets your expectations!


End file.
